Days in the History of Silence Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the open window.
    What he talked about. The children sleeping. I wanted to keep it separate, keep them outside that dark tunnel. They are going to want it themselves, he said, to get to know something about it.
    I looked around at the stores we were driving past, the tiny houses and gardens. I wanted to be a part of all that outside, that was what I wanted.
    They are so little, I said.
    Yes, but later, he replied.
    He asked if I wanted them to grow up without knowing who he was, his background, the Jewish family. He turned to face me.
    I do not remember if I returned his gaze, he had taken off the sunglasses, the deep impression on his nose left by the plastic, or whether I turned away, toward the window. I was scared. I visualized him on the bench in the city park when the darkness descended. I thought of the young women he had told me about, being led across the street toward the waiting vehicle. The baby.
    He had already spoken a few times about the possibility of finding out more about his own family, there had been several relatives, a young aunt, a cousin too. He knew nothing about them, no one knew anything about them, what had happened after they had been discovered. They were gone, they were sent off in the same way as the family he had seen on the street that day. Probably for extermination, the atrocities in the camps.
    Why now, what good will it do, I think I said. There’s nobody left, why should you keep looking?
    Once he had shown me photographs of children on their way to a gas chamber, they could have been pupils in single file on a school outing, eight or nine years old and carrying what I recall as bags or small bundles in their hands, dressed in warm coats, but with bare, skinny legs above their shoes. Youngsters glancing at the photographer as they walked past. He had asked me what I thought, how anyone could kill a child. Do you practice in advance, he asked, do you calculate how long it will take? And what do you do afterward. Do you just make your way home?
    He was talking about it again as we drove. I thought there was something tactless about it, as though he were beingindiscreet, coarse, as though he were relating something inappropriate. It was not suitable.
    The movement of the car. Our daughters sleeping.
    I shushed him.
    Don’t drag all that darkness in here, I said.
    I don’t understand, he said. How it’s possible to stop thinking about it.
    And when he said that, it felt like a complaint, I felt insulted. He continued to talk for a while longer there in the car, until perhaps I asked him to stop, or perhaps he stopped by himself.
    I looked nervously behind me at the children, at him with his suntanned hand on the steering wheel. The August sunlight through the car window. At any rate that is how I picture it now, afterward.
    Later, when the girls were teenagers, they wanted to know things about us, they wondered why we never visited any of his relatives. It is surprisingly easy not to say anything, not to tell, to remain silent. I did not want to be part of it. For the girls to become part of it. We told them it had been a small family, we said nothing about the brother Simon had lost contact with, we stated that his parents had been old, they were gone now. Which of course was also true. His parents were already old immediately after the war.
    We waited so long to tell them about it. I think we waited too long. By a certain point it had become too late.
    I look at Simon and it strikes me that the worry caused his face to age many years before its time, his frontal bonemarked with a fine horizontal line I have always assumed to be a scar from his childhood, a little wound that has healed. The kind of scar children get easily when they are playing. But it could also be an expression he often has, a way of wrinkling his brow, that has left its mark.

 
    I found a snail shell. I found it not so long ago in the closet in our room. I do not understand how it came to be there. I opened the